Coding betweenness in swedish and norwegian translations from english

Abstract

This paper examines the way in which the semantic notion of 'betweenness' is coded i Swedish and Norwegian translations of the same English source texts. The study take its starting point in the contention that the original English expressions of 'betweenness containing the preposition between constitute a viable tertium comparationis for translation of that form into the other two languages. A classification of all occurrences o between in the English source texts in The English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) an The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) in terms of the semantic role of th landmarks in the predications is followed by an analysis of the translations, both congruen and divergent. The primary focus, however, is not on the correspondences betwee the English original and its translations into Swedish and Norwegian, but on the parallel between the two sets of translations. To this end comparisons are drawn between th Swedish and Norwegian renderings of the various meanings of between in the sourc data. The analysis shows that Swedish and Norwegian resemble one another closely i the means employed to code the various senses of between. The last part of the stud offers a complementary perspective in comparing occurrences of the most commo translation equivalents of between, mellan in Swedish and mellom in Norwegian, i contexts where they do not translate between in the English source texts. This approach.